Co-designing science education

As described in the previous chapters, there are numerous variables in students’ career awareness and their aspirations in science. Educational research has already found some possible pedagogical guidelines how to overcome the challenge of students’

not pursuing science studies and careers. Therefore, to keep up, all teachers need to improve their teaching methods, for example by adopting, altering and developing novel instructional designs (Avalos, 2010). As well as the major global challenges related with science, also challenges in science education require broad-based competencies. Facing these challenges alone can be overwhelming for educators.

Thus, co-designing offers a realistic possibility to address these challenges and take the actual school requirements and resources into account (Juuti, Lavonen & Meisalo, 2016). This chapter introduces how teachers can develop their professionality through co-designing and how teachers’ ownership and agency relate with co-designing in educational development work.

2.3.1 Teacher professional development through collaboration

Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002) suggest in their interconnected model that the teacher professional growth occurs through personal (knowledge, beliefs and attitudes), practice (professional experimentation), consequence (salient outcomes) and external (information, stimulus or support sources) domains. The first three link to the teacher’s professional and practical world including their actions and consequences.

The external domain is not part of the teacher’s personal world but can still make a change in other domains. Their model recognize that reflection and enactment are processes that by a change in one domain may lead to changes in another domain (Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002). Teaching and learning are increasingly structured as community-based collaboration between teachers and other school community members (Darling-Hammond, Hyler & Gardner, 2017). Therefore, it is important that teacher professional development includes features of teacher collaboration (Mamlook-Naaman, Eilks, Bodner & Hofstein, 2018).

Teachers’ existing personal domain is not acknowledged when imposing them new educational innovations developed by someone else (van Driel, Beijaard & Verloop, 2001). Therefore, such top-down attempts usually fail or are not effective (Blonder et al., 2008). Converse approach, namely bottom-up, increases teachers’ perception of owning the innovation; they feel it belongs to them (Ogborn, 2002). However, by using the best out of both approaches it is possible to fast and easily introduce in-service teachers with new ideas, instructions and educational philosophies but also making explicit their personal domain. This approach is sometimes referred to as middle-out approach (Cummin, Phillips, Tilbrook & Lowe, 2005). Researchers, professionals or other experts included in these scaffolding processes support educators implementing

new instructions (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). As mentioned in subchapter 2.2, school-community/industry partnerships are important for students’ career awareness and science learning, but also for bringing teachers and scientists together as educational partners (Snitynsky, Rose & Pegg, J. 2019). This type of collaboration through partnerships helps educators to understand the relevance and usefulness of educational planning (Voogt et al., 2015).

One way of collaboration between teacher peers, students, researchers, professionals and other stakeholders is co-designing. Educational co-designing is creating or adapting teaching methods and learning activities through multi-professional group with up-to-date insights and new ideas (Könings, Seidel & Merrienboer, 2014). Teachers can understand the models and gain new competences in planning and implementing different instructions (Voogt et al., 2015). Furthermore, co-designing curricular and instructional models help teachers to realize their practical visions on which they can base their learning and professional growth (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). Though not forgetting their personal domain and expertise. Thus, during the interaction of co-designing, teachers can reflect their personal domain in relation to the designed material (cf. Ketelaar, Beijaard, Den Brok & Boshuizen, 2013). Whenever teachers design and implement novel educational innovations their sense of ownership and agency plays a remarkable role in making it work (Ketelaar et al., 2013). Therefore, study III investigates teachers’ ownership and agency to understand their perceptions of co-designing educational innovation and how to continue developing the instruction further.

2.3.2 Teachers’ ownership and agency in educational co-designing

Ownership and agency are closely related with identity. When one is welcoming, accepting and possessing ideas, concepts or in this study educational innovation, as part of their identity, they feel ownership towards these ideas and concepts. Thus, ownership is not only a mental state or feeling of owning the educational innovation and what is important in it for the owner (Pierce, Kostova, & Dirks, 2001). It is a matter of their mental or physical effort for the innovation to succeed (Struckman &

Yammarino, 2003). However, only if the owner feels that a change is necessary in current situation, they are willing to provide their effort in designing, implementing and reflecting the innovation (Ketelaar, 2012). For ownership to develop teachers as implementors of educational innovations must identify themselves with the innovation (Pierce et al., 2003) and support the design and ideas (Breiting, 2008). Ownership exists when teachers are given possibilities, support and recognition of their efforts in co-constructing new knowledge and educational improvements (Saunders et al., 2017).

Teacher agency is defined as their capacity of acting with problems and challenges to solve them. According to Biesta, Priestley and Robinson (2015), it is not something teachers have but what they do and achieve through their capabilities and environmental conditions. Furthermore, they have identified three dimensions

autonomy to define their teaching (Allen & Penuel, 2015). Teachers need high level of autonomy and possibilities to have open discussions within the work environment to make these work-related choices. Teachers’ sense of agency increases when their beliefs and attitudes align with new educational innovations. Then, it is easier for them to accommodate with the innovation (Ketelaar, Beijaard, Boshuizen & Den Brok, 2012).

Instead of concentrating on external and negative factors of the innovation, teachers who link successes and failures to themselves show a strong sense of agency in the process (Marshall & Drummond, 2006).

As this chapter has already shown, teacher’s ownership and agency are extensively studied. To sum, the literature review in study III revealed categories displayed in Table 1 affecting teachers’ ownership and agency in educational instruction design, implementation and reflection processes.

Table 1. The deductive approach to form categories of ownership and agency in study III.

Categories Sources

Ownership

Supporting the design or ideas Breiting (2008)

Mental/physical effort Struckman & Yammarino (2003) Identifying with the instruction Pierce et al. (2001)

Need for change Ketelaar (2012)

Agency

Successes and failures Marshall & Drummond (2006)

Accommodation Ketelaar et al. (2012)

Autonomy Allen & Penuel (2015)

Feel of control Konopasky & Sheridan (2016); Metcalfe & Greene (2007)

Teachers are interested about the salient outcomes of teaching they implement (Clarke

& Hollingsworth, 2002) and this enables teachers to associate with gains in students’

learning outcomes and make changes in their practice (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). This sets the latest educational knowledge and methods under their scope for finding how to enable students’ engagement in science learning and future careers.

Promoting teachers’ agency throughout implementing educational innovations within in their work affects their response of the innovation (Ketelaar, 2012). Therefore, also in this dissertation it is important to find out teachers’ experiences of ownership and agency to identify their own work-related goals and understanding and compare those with the choices they make. In addition, co-designing not only between teachers, but also between teachers, professionals, researchers and students are important in developing instruction model through DBR. Working through research and societal framework stages, practical stages and finally bottom-up stages, teachers and other stakeholders learn from each other and achieve professional development (Aksela, 2019). In addition, co-designing bridges the latest research, educational innovations, practice and curriculum requirements in science education.